Performance.

May 5, 2017 — Did You See This? To celebrate the centennial birthday of iconic French actor Danielle Darrieux, Dan Callahan has written an ode to her breathtaking work in the films of Max Ophuls and Jacques Demy. Of her performance in The Earrings...

Apr 21, 2017 — George Stevens’s Oscar-winning comedy captures the first sparks of attraction that ignited one of the great on- and offscreen romances in Hollywood history.

Apr 14, 2017 — Did You See This? The just-announced 2017 Cannes Film Festival lineup is a wealth of riches, with new work from Arnaud Desplechin, Abbas Kiarostami, Todd Haynes, Michael Haneke, Noah Baumbach, and Lynne Ramsay, plus a mystery-shrouded Twin Peaks revival. Bright...

Apr 13, 2017 — Reflecting on Jean Marais’s performance as the hero in Orpheus, Jean Cocteau once said that the actor “illuminates the film for me with his soul.” At the heart of the visionary auteur’s extravagantly designed fantasy worlds, Marais served as an...

Apr 12, 2017 — British director Jack Clayton elicited landmark performances from a host of great ladies of the cinema, including Maggie Smith, Deborah Kerr, and Anne Bancroft.

Apr 10, 2017 — Critic Peter Cowie pays tribute to a quintessentially English master, whose prolific career stretches back to the silent era.

Apr 2, 2017 — What defines noir acting? In her latest Dark Passages column, Imogen Sara Smith examines the stylistic variety in some of the genre’s most iconic male performances, including Burt Lancaster in The Killers and Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly.

Mar 28, 2017 — In his first English-language feature, Michelangelo Antonioni examines the elusiveness of the real through the lens of a murder mystery.

Mar 24, 2017 — Capturing the cultural anxieties of the 1970s, Hal Ashby’s comedic parable explores the pitfalls of innocence and credulity in American politics.

Mar 22, 2017 — A stately satire of modern media consumption and American politics, Hal Ashby’s 1979 film Being There follows the fortunes of a childlike gardener named Chance (Peter Sellers), who becomes an unlikely celebrity of D.C. high society after attracting the attention...